A site about recovering from a stroke

Gravity

When someone has trouble performing an exercise, making that exercise ‘gravity-eliminated’ is often helpful. So what the hell does that mean? That means that if someone is not strong enough yet to perform an exercise like for instance shoulder abduction (raising your arm out to the side), figure out a way to eliminate gravity from the equation. When someone is sitting or standing and asked to raise their arm out to the side, they’re not only lifting the resistance of the weight of their arm, but lifting against the resistance of gravity as well. Doing this exercise gravity eliminated would mean doing it lying down on their back. That takes away the resistance of gravity. And to make it even easier I would sometimes put a sliding board under their arm to also eliminate friction. A sliding board is something that’s really slippery that is usually used as something you sit on to help you ‘scoot.’
But easy is not at all what you want. This is a trick I would use to help get the movement back but as soon as possible gravity should be added back in as well as weights.

I used to love the imagination of my physical therapists. Lying me down, strapping me to a stationary bike, and firing little electrical pulses into my leg to kickstart me. Then there was a sort of Dance Dance Revolution for stroke patients.

But the best bit was when one of my therapists saw that (through a combination of nerve damage and atrophy, I guess) I couldn’t turn my left foot very well.

So, she taped her right sneaker to my left, and guided me through a few kind of three-legged turns. Within a couple of days, I was cornering like…. Well, like a more adept stroke patient. Brilliant!

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Disclaimer…

This blog IS NOT intended to be medical advice of any sort. I am writing about my experiences, my knowledge, and my opinions. My goal is to tell people what I'm going through and hopefully help someone.
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All that being said, rest assured that everything you read on this blog is written by a highly educated, highly trained, and highly experienced medical practitioner.
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Dr. Amy Elder (formerly Shissler) PT, DPT, Cert. MDT------my full name and title